Publication day… again!

My UK publishers, Little Brown, have decided to release “Messy” a little earlier than planned – by popular demand, they tell me. If you were one of the people who pre-ordered a copy and helped to trigger that decision, thank you!

Official publication date is this Thursday, but I’m told the books should be arriving in bookshops from Monday. You can also order online – I’d expect the books to start shipping almost immediately.

Meanwhile a couple of other bits of Messy news. The New York Times published a lovely review that made me excited about my own book! The reviewer, Maria Konnikova, really understood what I was trying to say, which doesn’t always happen.

“Harford’s argument goes beyond aesthetics, resurfacing over and over in his engrossing narrative, from music (Brian Eno’s oblique strategies defying all convention, which resulted in David Bowie’s album “Heroes”) to tweeting (the non-prescriptivist response of the British telecom company O2 to a power outage). During World War II, Gen. Erwin Rommel’s messy autonomy allowed him to succeed against great odds: Even when the British had broken Germany’s codes, they couldn’t predict his actions. They had no idea that he would disobey direct orders; neither, of course, did his superiors. “Life cannot be controlled. Life itself is messy,” Harford writes. When we try to be rigid in response, the result is a messy failure.”

“Mr Harford’s book strays well beyond mess of the physical sort (though he devotes a whole section to railing against oppressive tidy-desk policies, which he argues disempower workers and make them unproductive). Most of the book is about other types of mess: randomness, experimentation and human autonomy… “Messy” masterfully weaves together anecdote and academic work.”